Today was quite light at the hospital and I used the chunk of time to gist with the married nurses about their sexuality.

Call me a 'perv' at your pleasure. But...

I just wanted to hear about sex from the "wives" point of view. And something I thought was going to be a ridiculous talk about sexual initiation and preference became a discussion where culture, beliefs and upbringing showed itself up in their bedroom lives.

There are three things I learned from them.

1.It is culturally acceptable that women shouldn't initiate sex. Only men should. If she does, her man won't trust her when he travels. He'd feel she will be sleeping around in his absence.

2 The nurses I asked also believe that you should deny a man many times or else,he will make sex an everyday affair. "Sex is not food", they gleefully chorused.

3 Sex is primarily for conception. It should normally wane in frequency after the first childbirth. Sex for pleasure only has its place before marriage. After that, 'shikena.'

I know you think this is anti-delluvian, archaic and even outmoded but these resolutions are warm, alive and they breathe in the homes of those we live with everyday,who look like happily married couples but are starved of sexual satisfaction and freedom, as we define it today from Hollywood scripts.

The earliest time any of those nurses had sex was three weeks ago. She shrugged and said" after all "sex isn't money!"

"Indeed!" I could only say with a nod.

I am neither a sex nor a marriage counsellor, but I see those aforementioned brick walls between couples who come to my office to say they have trouble in the bedroom.

It has become a cold, silent and lonely crypt where moans are absent and the sounds of kisses are only distant memories. They think it is a medical illness and I'm almost fooled too. But no. it's cultural. It's personal. It's both.

I learned today that when you talk to a person, even on something as sumptuous as the subject of sex, you are engaging a culture, a background, an inclination, a philosophy, a woven constellation of persuasions rather than a mere opinion.

It's easy to tell us stories about how your sex lives will rock when you are married. 20th-Century-Fox bathtub drama episode,right?

I'd like to hear them AFTER you are married.